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Douglas_Knight comments on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 - Less Wrong Discussion
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What do you mean by "theoretical"? Is this just an insult you fling at people you disagree with?
Huh? What a curious misunderstanding! The theoretical referred just the - theoretical! - question of whether it's in principle possible to acquire native-like proficiency, which was contrasted with my claim that even if it is, most people cannot expect to reach that state in practice.
I thought that my choice of the word "commonly" indicated that I was not talking about the limits of the possible.
You really think it's common for L2 speakers to achieve native-like levels of proficiency? Where do you live and who are these geniuses? I'm serious. For example, I see people speaking at conferences who have lived in the US for years, but aren't native speakers, and they are still not doing so with native-like fluency and eloquence. And presumably you have to be more than averagely intelligent to give a talk at a scientific conference...
I'm not talking about just any kind of fluency here, and neither was fubarobfusco, I assume. I suspect I was trying to interpret your utterance in a way that I didn't assign very low probability to (i.e. not as claiming that it's common for people to become native-like) and that also wasn't a non-sequitur wrt the claim you were referring to (by reducing native-like fluency to some weaker notion) and kind of failed.
Maybe I should have said "routinely" rather than "commonly." But the key differentiator is effort.
I don't care about your theoretical question of whether you can come up with a test that L2 speakers fail. I assume that fubarobfusco meant the same thing I meant. I'm done.